THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 30, 2018
17
COMMENT
UNRULE OF L AW
The enlistment, last Thursday, of Ru-
dolph Giuliani---the former mayor
of New York and now a purveyor of se-
curity advice and partisan rants---as a
personal lawyer to Donald Trump marked
the entry into the President's legal drama
of another character whose presence was
unlikely and yet somehow inevitable. It
was of a piece with the moment, earlier
in the week, when lawyers for Michael
Cohen, another Trump attorney, asserted
that a client whose identity Cohen was
anxious to keep secret was Sean Hann-
ity, of Fox News. That came during a
court hearing that was also attended by
Stormy Daniels, the adult- lm actress
and director, who is in a legal ght with
Cohen and Trump over a hush agree-
ment. Giuliani says that his job is to
quickly "negotiate an end" to the inves-
tigation by the special counsel Robert
Mueller into Russian interference in the
election---as if that matter, and re-
lated issues that Mueller has uncovered,
were akin to a casino bankruptcy restruc-
turing, in which debts and bad behav-
ior can simply be swept away.
Also last week, in the interval between
a statement from Hannity to the e ect
that he wasn't exactly Cohen's client and
Giuliani's claim that he was going to be
what might be called the xer di tutti
xers, James Comey, the former F.B.I.
director, published a memoir, "A Higher
Loyalty."(A striking element of the book
is Comey's comparison of Trump's circle
to the Mafia.) To complicate matters
even further, Comey, whose ring fea-
tures prominently in Mueller's investiga-
tion, once worked for Giuliani, when
Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York. In the
book, Comey describes Giuliani stand-
ing in his o ce doorway, giving him a
"pep talk" about investigating Al Sharp-
ton, at the time a community activist, for
alleged embezzlement, which Giuliani
concluded by saying, "Oh, and I want the
fucking medal"---meaning the medallion
that Sharpton often wore. (Sharpton was
eventually acquitted on state charges.)
The Comey-Giuliani connection is
another reminder of how the Trump
Presidency has dragged us back to the
gaudy, big-shouldered Manhattan of
the nineteen-eighties. But even Comey
appeared thrown by the plot twist in-
volving his old boss. During an inter-
view on Thursday night at Town Hall,
when The New Yorker's David Remnick
asked Comey about the Giuliani ap-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
pointment, he paused for a long mo-
ment and said, "I don't know what to
make of it." He added, "I don't know
what the attorney-client dynamic is like
around the President."
The same night, memos that Comey
had written after his meetings and phone
calls with Trump, which multiple con-
gressional committees had obtained from
the Justice Department, were leaked to
the press. In one, about a dinner at the
White House at which the President
asked for his loyalty, Comey said that
the experience of talking to Trump was
"chaotic, with topics touched, left, then
returned to later, making it very di cult
to recount in a linear fashion." It was, he
wrote, "conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle."
That description could t any attempt
to summarize the various Trump scan-
dals. Trying to explain how they all in-
tersect begins to sound like a verbal
version of those charts in investigators'
o ces, with pictures and yarn connect-
ing pins in locations as far- ung as Mos-
cow, Washington, Prague, Kiev, Ankara,
Baku, Dubai, Hong Kong, a parking lot
in Las Vegas, and various suites in Trump
Tower---and, at the center, the President.
And yet, in the disparate cases, one
can already glimpse a clear theme: Trump's
disdain for legal limits and, perhaps more
dangerous, his almost uncanny ability to
draw others into his vision. Comey writes
in his memoir that, in a White House
where lying, or remaining silent as the
President lies, is considered an essential
act of loyalty, he could "see how easily
everyone in the room could become a
co-conspirator to his preferred set of
facts, or delusions." Michael Avenatti,